The World I used to Know

Writing history is an imaginative act. Few people would deny this, but not everyone agrees on what it means. It doesn’t mean, obviously, that historians may alter or suppress the facts, because that is not being imaginative; it’s being dishonest. The role of imagination in writing history isn’t to make up things that aren’t there; it’s to make sensible the things that are there. When you undertake historical research, two truths that once sounded banal come to seem profound. The first is that your knowledge of the past apart, occasionally, from a limited visual record and the odd unreliable survivor comes entirely from written documents. You are almost completely cut off, by a wall of print, from the life you have set out to represent. You can’t observe historical events; you can’t question historical actors; you can’t even know most of what has not been written
about. Whatever has been written about therefore takes on an importance which may be spurious. A few lines in a memoir, a snatch of recorded conversation, a letter fortuitously preserved, an event noted in a diary: all become luminous with significance even though these are just the bits that have floated to the surface. The historian clings to them, while somewhere below, the huge submerged wreck of the past sinks silently out of sight.

The second realization that strikes you is, in a way, the opposite of the first: the more material you dredge up, the more bits and pieces you recover, the more elusive the subject becomes. In the case of a historical figure, there is usually a standard biographical interpretation, constructed around a small number of details: diary entries, letters, secondhand anecdotes, putatively autobiographical passages in the published work. Out of these details, a psychological profile is constructed, which, in the circular process that characterizes most biographical enterprise, is then used to interpret the details. It is almost always possible, though, by ranging a little more widely or digging a little deeper, to find details that are inconsistent with the standard interpretation, or that seem to point to a different interpretation, or that have been ignored because they are fragments that don’t support any coherent interpretation. And usually there’s a level of detail below that, and on and on. One instinct you need in doing historical research is knowing when to keep dredging stuff up; another is knowing when to stop.

You stop when you feel that you’ve got it, and this is where imagination matters. The test for a successful history is the same as the test for a successful novel: integrity in motion. It’s not the facts, snapshots of the past, that make a history; it’s the story, the facts run by the eye at the correct speed. Novelists sometimes explain their work by saying that they invent a character, put the character in a situation, and then wait to see what the character will do. History is not different. The historian’s character has to do what the real person has done, of course, but there is an uncanny way in which this can seem to happen almost spontaneously. The “Marx” that the historian has imagined keeps behaving, in every new set of conditions, like Marx. This gives the description of the conditions a plausibility, too: the person fits the time. The world turns beneath the character’s marching feet. The figures and the landscape come to life together, and the chart of their movements makes a continuous motion, a narrative. The past reveals itself to have a plot.

28 – 31 January 1972 On Talos station off North Vietnam. Radar hunting.

1 – 4 February 1972 On Talos station off North Vietnam. During this period Oklahoma City fired a Talos RIM-8H anti radiation missile and destroyed a NVN mobile radar installation. It was the first successful surface-to-surface combat missile shot in US Navy history.

7 – 30 April 1972 Conducting Naval Gunfire Support in the DMZ and gunfire strikes in North Vietnam. The ship received hostile fire from shore batteries on many occasions during this period. The ship attacked AAW sites, bridges, a communications station, a fuel storage depot and barracks.

7 April 1972 Received hostile fire from shore batteries north of the Cua Viet River. This action earned the Oklahoma City the Combat Action Ribbon.

15 April 1972 Conducted gunfire strikes north of 20°N in North Vietnam.

16 April 1972 Conducted gunfire strikes on Haiphong, North Vietnam. Received hostile fire.

17 April 1972 Conducted gunfire strikes on Vinh, North Vietnam.

19 April 1972 Participated in the battle of Dong Hoi Gulf, North Vietnam. The task force was attacked by NVN MiGs. A 250 pound bomb from a MiG 17 hit the USS Higbee (DD-806), injuring four sailors. The MiG 17 was shot down by missile fire from the USS Sterett (DDG-31). USS Lloyd Thomas (DD-764) and the USS Sterett are thought to have sunk two NVN torpedo boats. Oklahoma City received slight damage to antennas from shore battery fire during the engagement.

1 May 1972 Conducting Naval Gunfire Support and gunfire strikes in the Vietnam combat zone.

2 – 3 May 1972 En route to Subic Bay, Republic of the Philippines

4 – 6 May 1972 In port Subic Bay. Regunned the 6″/47 battery.

7 – 9 May 1972 En route to the Vietnam combat zone for Naval Gunfire Support and strike operations.

10 – 31 May 1972 Conducting Naval Gunfire Support and strike operations in North Vietnam and at the DMZ. Received hostile fire from shore batteries on several occasions. In company with the USS Newport News (CG-148), USS Providence (CLG-6) and destroyers USS Hanson (DD-832), USS Myles C. Fox (DD-829) and USS Buchannan (DDG-14), Oklahoma City shelled the Cat Bai military airfield on the Do Son peninsula at the mouth of Haiphong Harbor, North Vietnam. This was the first multi-cruiser strike since World War II.

“You know what you are? You’re God’s answer to Job, y’know? You would have ended all argument between them. I mean, He would have pointed to you and said, y’know, I do a lot of terrible things, but I can still make one of these. You know? And then Job would have said, Eh. Yeah, well, you win.”

I envy. This secret
I have not revealed before.
I know there is somewhere a boy
whom I greatly envy.
I envy the way he fights;
I myself was never so guileless and bold.
I envy the way he laughs-
as a boy I could never laugh like that.
He always walks about with bumps and bruises;
I’ve always been better combed, intact.
He will not miss all those passages in books
I’ve missed. Here he is stronger too.
He will be more blunt and harshly honest,
forgiving no evil even if it does some good;
and where I’d dropped my pen: ‘It isn’t worth it…’
he’d assert: ‘It’s worth it! ‘ and pick up the pen.
If he can’t unravel a knot, he’ll cut it through,
where I can neither unravel a knot, nor cut it through.
Once he falls in love, he won’t fall out of it,
while I keep falling in and out of love.
I’ll hide my envy. Start to smile.
I’ll pretend to be a simple soul:
‘Someone has to smile;
someone has to live in a different way…’
But much as I tried to persuade myself of this,
repeating: ‘To each man his fate…’
I can’t forget there is somewhere a boy
who will achieve far more than I.